It seems that war or strife has always been with us, at least since Cain had his fateful encounter with his brother Abel (Genesis 4:1-8). Thereafter, it became ever more commonplace for people or nations to strive against one another. The Old Testament is filled with stories of the Israelites and their wars against other peoples in what we know today as the Holy Land, just as today’s news is also filled with armed struggle of one sort or another. What are we to make of war, though, as the good Christians we are always striving to be?
For Christians, there is a difference between “Thou shalt not kill,” and recognized warfare. A large number of Christians make an understandable error in reading what is said by God in the Old Testament Book of Exodus, (Exodus 20:13, New International Version) as being applicable to war. However, when He said “Thou shalt not kill,” He meant the intentional murder of another person or people, which the Hebrew word for “kill” is understood to mean.
The Old Testament has many stories of God’s command to make war. The first book of Samuel (1 Samuel) contains a telling passage (1 Samuel 15:3, NIV). In it, God commands the Israelites to attack the Amalekites and make total war against them. This is certainly a harsh passage, but it is illustrative of the difference between war and murder, or killing. In fact, there are more than several different passages in the Old Testament where God also orders that the death penalty be applied for commission of certain crimes.
God is against murder, but understands that war is sometimes necessary. The world we live in is populated by many people who mean to do others harm. These people are sometimes the leaders of other nations, and their actions as leaders can bring their nations to a point where armed forces must appear in order to deal with the problems they have caused. Perhaps the clearest indication in the New Testament that war can be a necessary thing, under the proper circumstances, is Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 3:10-18, NIV). To summarize the verses, with such sinful people in this world, war is inevitable.
If Jesus is in perfect agreement with his Father, our Lord, then the permission to make “just” (proper) war is also contained within the New Testament. Those who are against war under any circumstance sometimes try to say that the new covenant between God and humans, which exists in the New Testament of the Bible, supersedes anything written in the Old Testament. This theory, while attractive in certain cases, does not apply when it comes to war. Think of things this way: We know that Jesus and God are one, as stated in John 10:30. If this is so, then it logically follows that the view of Jesus and of God would not have changed at all, as it applies to anything written in the Old Testament. James 1:17 says it perfectly: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” Therefore, God’s acceptance of the need to make a just war crosses from the Old to the New in smooth fashion.
As Christians, we know that war is a bad thing. However, some wars are proper, and God recognizes this. There are several passages in both the Old and New Testaments in support of this idea. Perhaps the most famous is that found in Ecclesiastes 3:8, in which we are told that “There is … a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.” We should never deliberately seek out war as a means to solve every inconvenience or problem we may have with another nation; however, we should also recognize that in a world in which truly evil leaders exist, war is sometimes an inevitable occurrence.
